Re: [Noffle-users] fetching groups article-count data

[Nicholas P. <ni...@ni...>]

Jim,

On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Jim Hague wrote:

Due to the long delay, I'll summarise what the conversation was about;

I'd mentioned that I'd like it not to be obvious which news groups are 
subscribed already when a new person joins using the noffle server.

> You'd need to keep the numbers current, which would mean a 'noffle
> -q' on every fetch; getting this info takes a while on a dial-up
> line.  For a reasonable newsfeed you're talking about a 40000 groups
> * average 40 chars group name + first/last count = ~1.5Mb. Better
> not make that default behaviour...

This would be ok for me. I do not pay for my dialup, so I can just
cron an update each morning.

> Having said we had those article locally (which is what 'noffle -g'
> implies) we'd have then to generate a 'not yet fetched' when you
> tried to read them.  Normally when we do this (in over/thread
> modes), we do at least have the article overview (subject,
> message-id, from, references, date, size), so that your newsreader
> will thread everything correctly and you see useful information. I'm
> not sure how useful 300 'Not yet fetched' articles would be, and I
> have a nasty feeling that changing header info as we go might
> confuse some newsreaders. It would also mean some internal changes
> to Noffle - currently the trigger article only is generated on the
> fly; other Noffle articles are generated into the article base just
> as if you'd posted them. Generating, say, 50 'not yet fetched'
> messages for every group isn't on; they'd have to be done on the
> fly.

I understand from this that if you tell the client you have 234
messges, and it then asks for the details you have to provide it 234
sets of details ?

Nick

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